beachdog's Journal: Automotive SPICE in Practice ... what is it? A pico review

A short review of

• Automotive SPICE in Practice Surviving Interpretation and Assessment

, by Klaus Hoermann, Markus Mueller, Lars Dittmann and Joerg Zimmer. Published by Rocky Nook Computing, c. 2008, $54.95.

SPICE is an acronym for "software process improvement and capability determination".

Automotive SPICE is a book about organizing an automotive related software business to apply for the ISO/IEC 15504 standard recognition.

According to the Foreword in Automotive Spice: "ISO 9001 certifications in the '90's have not led OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) to have true confidence in the processes of their development partners."

So, without using acronyms: This is a book about organizing a business that develops automotive software to produce quality software. In particular, this book is addressed to people that are involved with creating the quality structure and the people who work as assessors, determining if the specific quality activities are accomplished.

But this is a book with loads of acronyms. That stuff we might call "quality" software depends upon a structure that surrounds the stuff that is written. Rather than remember and recite how to do some of these quality activities an acronym is created. Some of the acronyms that really do this well incude:

          EITVOX Entry criteria,Inputs, Tasks, Verification, Outputs, exit Criteria
          FTA Fault tree analysis. (Sounds like a good one to know, yes?)
          GQM Goal Question Metric

  Automotive software differs in several ways from other software: the product goes into cars, it could have been written by a supplier, there are lots of embedded applications, lots of software becomes obsolete with the annual model cycle but the application software could be responsible for safety for many years after production ended.

One of the interesting things about the Automotive SPICE project is the membership. The members are European automakers plus Ford. Car makers that are not named as members include General Motors, Chrysler and no Japanese and no Chinese and no Indian and no Korean auto makers.

The Automotive SPICE project has a website.

http://www.automotivespice.com/index.html

The text of the Automotive Spice assessment model and process reference model are available for download, registration required

http://www.automotivespice.com/automotiveSIG_PAM_v24.pdf